L&M nurses going back to Haiti

New London - Haiti's continuing struggles since the Jan. 12 earthquake may have disappeared from nightly television broadcasts and the front pages of many newspapers, but Jessica Patti hasn't forgotten.

The New London resident is preparing to bring her nursing skills to the impoverished nation for the second time since the earthquake, bringing with her a team of five colleagues to help care for earthquake victims. Two more trips in March are already planned, with volunteers already committed.

"I'm going back to sleeping on the roof of the hospital and cold showers for 10 days," Patti said Tuesday of her upcoming trip. "But this time I'm bringing an air mattress."

The desire to devote as much time as possible to help Haiti has caused Patti to give up her permanent job at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital. Now she works there on a per diem basis, so that she can have more flexibility in her schedule.

"It has taken over my life," Patti said. "It happened really quickly. But doors kept opening. People keep thanking us for what we're doing, they're rallying behind us."

Leaving with her Sunday to volunteer at a Port-au-Prince hospital will be a team that includes L&M registered nurses Cheryl Mauldin, who joined Patti and four others on the first trip, and Susan Donovan. Donovan's husband Ron, a Realtor and part-time paramedic at L&M, is also going. All three are city residents.

Joining them will be Edward Soltesz, a physicians' assistant at Waterbury Hospital, and Dr. Matt Spates of Norwich, who works in the emergency department at The William W. Backus Hospital.

"This just came at the perfect time for us to free ourselves up to go, and it's something we feel we wanted to do. We have the skills, and there's a need," Ron Donovan said of why he and his wife decided to use their vacation time to volunteer in Haiti.

The team will be flying into the Dominican Republic courtesy of JetBlue, then traveling by car to Port-au-Prince, bringing with them as much as they can carry in donated medical supplies. Students at the Pine Point School in Stonington have collected baby bottles the group will be taking.

They will be working at the Haitian Community Hospital, the same place Patti, Mauldin and the rest of the first volunteer team were stationed last month. Patti said administrators at the hospital, which is just outside the city and was not severely damaged in the earthquake, invited her and her team back. "I'm really honored," she said.

During their first trip, many of the patients they cared for were victims of traumatic injuries. This time, Patti said, she expects they will be treating mainly patients needing post-surgical care and treatment for secondary earthquake-related illnesses such as infections, respiratory illnesses and malnutrition.

Spates, the Backus emergency physician, said he's wanted to volunteer in Haiti since reading "Mountains Beyond Mountains," Tracy Kidder's book about Partners in Health founder Dr. Paul Farmer, a few years ago, then hearing Farmer speak at Boston College. Before he started working at Backus, he worked with Patti and Mauldin in the emergency department at L&M. When he heard they were organizing medical missionary trips to Haiti, he decided his chance had come.

"It just seemed like it would be more of a grass-roots kind of thing they were doing, rather than going with a large international organization" like Partners in Health, he said. "I'm hoping this will be the beginning of a new tradition in my life."

For Patti, too, reading "Mountains Beyond Mountains" was the start of her passion for helping Haiti. After her first trip there last year as a medical volunteer with an existing group, she decided to set up a southeastern Connecticut-based organization to run regular trips in which local nurses, doctors and other medical professionals could give care at a weekend clinic. Mauldin joined her in the effort, calling their group Raising Haiti.

But just as their idea began to take shape, the earthquake hit. Now, Patti plans to continue making regular trips with medical volunteers to help earthquake victims, while also building the Raising Haiti organization to become a regular presence there. A local attorney is donating his services to help with official paperwork filings.

"After my first trip to Haiti, I knew that I had made a lifelong commitment to that country," she said. "I saw so many things that could be fixed so easily. If you're a medical professional and you go there and don't feel that way, you don't get it."

www.raisinghaiti.com